"Prince in Disguise"

New from Disney-Hyperion: Prince in Disguise by Stephanie Kate Strohm.

About the book, from the publisher:

Someday I want to live in a place where I never hear "You're Dusty's sister?" ever again.

Life is real enough for Dylan-especially as the ordinary younger sister of Dusty, former Miss Mississippi and the most perfect, popular girl in Tupelo. But when Dusty wins the hand of the handsome Scottish laird-to-be Ronan on the TRC television network's crown jewel, Prince in Disguise, Dylan has to face a different kind of reality: reality TV.

As the camera crew whisks them off to Scotland to film the lead-up to the wedding, camera-shy Dylan is front and center as Dusty's maid of honor. The producers are full of surprises-including old family secrets, long-lost relatives, and a hostile future mother-in-law who thinks Dusty and Dylan's family isn't good enough for her only son. At least there's Jamie, an adorably bookish groomsman who might just be the perfect antidote to all Dylan's stress ... if she just can keep TRC from turning her into the next reality show sensation.

Visit Stephanie Kate Strohm's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Taming of the Drew.

My Book, The Movie: The Taming of the Drew.

Writers Read: Stephanie Kate Strohm (April 2016).

Coffee with a Canine: Stephanie Kate Strohm & Lorelei Lee Strohm-Lando.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Will to Battle"

New from Tor Books: The Will to Battle: Terra Ignota (Volume 3) by Ada Palmer.

About the book, from the publisher:

The long years of near-utopia have come to an abrupt end.

Peace and order are now figments of the past. Corruption, deception, and insurgency hum within the once steadfast leadership of the Hives, nations without fixed location.

The heartbreaking truth is that for decades, even centuries, the leaders of the great Hives bought the world’s stability with a trickle of secret murders, mathematically planned. So that no faction could ever dominate. So that the balance held.

The Hives’ façade of solidity is the only hope they have for maintaining a semblance of order, for preventing the public from succumbing to the savagery and bloodlust of wars past. But as the great secret becomes more and more widely known, that façade is slipping away.

Just days earlier, the world was a pinnacle of human civilization. Now everyone—Hives and hiveless, Utopians and sensayers, emperors and the downtrodden, warriors and saints—scrambles to prepare for the seemingly inevitable war.

Visit Ada Palmer's website.

The Page 69 Test: Too Like the Lightning.

Writers Read: Ada Palmer (June 2016).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Shadow Sun Seven"

New from Tor/Forge: Shadow Sun Seven: The Starfire Trilogy (Volume 2) by Spencer Ellsworth.

About the book, from the publisher:

Shadow Sun Seven continues Spencer Ellsworth's Starfire trilogy, an action-packed space opera in which the oppressed half-Jorian crosses have risen up to supplant humanity.

Jaqi, Araskar and Z are on the run from everyone - the Resistance, the remnants of the Empire, the cyborg Suits, and right now from the Matakas - and the Matakas are the most pressing concern because the insectoid aliens have the drop on them. The Resistance has a big reward out for Araskar and the human children he and Jaqi are protecting. But Araskar has something to offer the mercenary aliens. He knows how to get to a huge supply of pure oxygen cells, something in short supply in the formerly human Empire, and that might be enough to buy their freedom. Araskar knows where it is, and Jaqi can take them there. With the Matakas as troops, they break into Shadow Sun Seven, on the edge of the Dark Zone.

Visit Spencer Ellsworth's website.

Learn about Spencer Ellsworth’s five top works of SF that turn weird bug behavior into great fiction.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi"

New from Bloomsbury Academic: Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi by Dan Healey.

About the book, from the publisher:

Examining nine 'case histories' that reveal the origins and evolution of homophobic attitudes in modern Russia, Dan Healey asserts that the nation's contemporary homophobia can be traced back to the particular experience of revolution, political terror and war its people endured after 1917.

The book explores the roots of homophobia in the Gulag, the rise of a visible queer presence in Soviet cities after Stalin, and the political battles since 1991 over whether queer Russians can be valued citizens. Healey also reflects on the problems of 'memorylessness' for Russia's LGBT (lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender) movement more broadly and the obstacles it faces in trying to write its own history. The book makes use of little-known source material - much of it untranslated archival documentation - to explore how Russians have viewed same-sex love and gender transgression since the mid-20th century.

Russian Homophobia from Stalin to Sochi provides a compelling background to the culture wars over the status of LGBT citizens in Russia today, whilst serving as a key text for all students of modern Russia.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Assassination of William McKinley"

New from Lexington Books: The Assassination of William McKinley: Anarchism, Insanity, and the Birth of the Social Sciences by Cary Federman.

About the book, from the publisher:

This book is an examination of the assassination of President William McKinley by Leon Czolgosz, an American-born purported anarchist. This work offers a new and different way to approach historical crime stories. Rather than accepting the idea that Czolgosz was inherently dangerous because of his ethnic background or his obscure political statements, Federman argues, rather, that political relations, historical events, and the developing discourses in the natural and social sciences toward normal and pathological behaviors structured the meaning of the assassination. Federman proposes there are six ways to view an assassin, each corresponding to a social science. Consequently, each chapter of this manuscript examines a social science and its relation to the assassination. Overall, there are three purposes to this work: One is to examine the rise of the social sciences at the time of the assassination. The second is to explore the historical and political understanding of political violence; and the third is to examine the meaning of legal responsibility

Cary Federman is associate professor in the Department of Justice Studies at Montclair State University.

--Marshal Zeringue

"Gluttony and Gratitude"

New from Penn State University Press: Gluttony and Gratitude: Milton's Philosophy of Eating by Emily E. Stelzer.

About the book, from the publisher:

Despite the persistence and popularity of addressing the theme of eating in Paradise Lost, the tradition of Adam and Eve’s sin as one of gluttony—and the evidence for Milton’s adaptation of this tradition—has been either unnoticed or suppressed. Emily Stelzer provides the first book-length work on the philosophical significance of gluttony in this poem, arguing that a complex understanding of gluttony and of ideal, grateful, and gracious eating informs the content of Milton’s writing. Stelzer works with contextual material in the fields of physiology, philosophy, theology, and literature and builds from recent scholarship on Milton’s experience of and knowledge about matter and the body to draw connections between Milton’s work and both underexamined textual influences (including, for example, Gower’s Confessio Amantis) and well recognized ones (such as Augustine’s City of God and Galen’s On the Natural Faculties).

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Sea of the Dead"

New from Walden Pond Press: The Sea of the Dead by Barry Wolverton.

About the book, from the publisher:

An engrossing fantasy, a high-seas adventure, an alternate history epic—this is the richly imagined and gorgeously realized third book in acclaimed author Barry Wolverton’s Chronicles of the Black Tulip, perfect for fans of The Glass Sentence and the Books of Beginning series.

After the harrowing and life-changing events at the Dragon’s Gate, Bren wants nothing more than to make his way back to England. Finding the answers to the great mysteries he’d been chasing only found him questioning why he’d ever pursued them in the first place, and now he’s lost his best friend, forever. There’s nothing left for him but to return home and hope his father hasn’t given up on him.

But just because Bren is done with adventure does not mean adventure is done with him. On his way to escape from China, Bren is gifted a rare artifact, with a connection to a place no one has set foot upon. Soon he’s fallen in with a mysterious Indian noblewoman bent on discovering an ancient power and leading her country against colonial rule.

The only way home, it seems, is through helping her—and as Bren wonders what she’s willing to sacrifice in order to return home a hero, he must ask himself the same questions.

Visit Barry Wolverton's website.

The Page 69 Test: The Vanishing Island.

Writers Read: Barry Wolverton (September 2015).

--Marshal Zeringue

"Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire"

New from Yale University Press: Regulating Sex in the Roman Empire: Ideology, the Bible, and the Early Christians by David Wheeler-Reed.

About the book, from the publisher:

A New Testament scholar challenges the belief that American family values are based on “Judeo-Christian” norms by drawing unexpected comparisons between ancient Christian theories and modern discourses

Challenging the long-held assumption that American values—be they Christian or secular—are based on “Judeo-Christian” norms, this provocative study compares ancient Christian discourses on marriage and sexuality with contemporary ones, maintaining that modern family values owe more to Roman Imperial beliefs than to the bible.

Engaging with Foucault’s ideas, Wheeler-Reed examines how conservative organizations and the Supreme Court have misunderstood Christian beliefs on marriage and the family. Taking on modern cultural debates on marriage and sexuality, with implications for historians, political thinkers, and jurists, this book undermines the conservative ideology of the family, starting from the position that early Christianity, in its emphasis on celibacy and denunciation of marriage, was in opposition to procreation, the ideological norm in the Greco-Roman world.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Smell of War"

New from Texas A&M University Press: The Smell of War: Three Americans in the Trenches of World War I by Virginia Bernhard.

About the book, from the publisher:

Historian Virginia Bernhard has deftly woven together the memoirs and letters of three American soldiers—Henry Sheahan, Mike Hogg, and George Wythe—to capture a vivid, poignant portrayal of what it was like to be “over there.” These firsthand recollections focus the lens of history onto one small corner of the war, into one small battlefield, and in doing so they reveal new perspectives on the horrors of trench warfare, life in training camps, transportation and the impact of technology, and the post-armistice American army of occupation.

Henry Sheahan’s memoir, A Volunteer Poilu, was first published in 1916. He was a Boston-born, Harvard-educated ambulance driver for the French army who later became a well-known New England nature writer, taking a family name “Beston” as his surname. George Wythe, from Weatherford, Texas, was a descendant of the George Wythe who signed the Declaration of Independence. Mike Hogg, born in Tyler, Texas, was the son of former Texas governor James Stephen Hogg.

The Smell of War, by collecting and annotating the words of these three individuals, paints a new and revealing literary portrait of the Great War and those who served in it.

Visit Virginia Bernhard's website.

--Marshal Zeringue

"The Truth Beneath the Lies"

New from Delacorte Press: The Truth Beneath the Lies by Amanda Searcy.

About the book, from the publisher:

For fans of The Darkest Corners and Pretty Little Liars, Amanda Searcy’s debut novel will have readers both disturbed and entranced by one girl’s present-day horrors and another’s haunting past.

Flight.
All Kayla Asher wants to do is run. Run from the government housing complex she calls home. Run from her unstable mother. Run from a desperate job at No Limits Food. Run to a better, cleaner, safer life. Every day is one day closer to leaving.

Fight.
All Betsy Hopewell wants to do is survive. Survive the burner phone hidden under her bed. Survive her new rules. Survive a new school with new classmates. Survive being watched. Every minute grants her another moment of life.

When fate brings Kayla and Betsy together, only one girl will survive.

Visit Amanda Searcy's website.

--Marshal Zeringue